Beautiful Doom is an enhancement mod for Doom designed to work under GZDoom, Zandronum and ZDoom. First released back in 2008 this mod aims to improve each and every single object in Doom, making them smoother, more impressive visually and having better sounds while retaining VANILLA gameplay. You will see smoke, casings, debris, hugely enhanced gibbing system, smooth weapon animations, but it will all play the same as vanilla Doom plays with (G)ZDoom.

For those, who want to shake things up a bit there are two weapon sets (can be changed from Beautiful Doom Options): the 'Vanilla Guns' only look better but act the same as original Doom guns. The 'Enhanced Guns' introduce a number of changes: for example fist and pistol are slightly more effective, and many weapons have alternative attacks which, while not really more powerful, provide certain tactical variety. Choose whichever you want!

WHAT'S NEW IN 6.x.x.x compared to previous versions:

It's inside a pk3. You can play it as a whole or tear it up and take out the things you like. But make sure YOU ALWAYS USE BDOOM_MAIN.WAD.

The mod is split into 6 wads:

BDOOM_MAIN.WAD - always needed!

BDoom_weapons.wad - weapons and their effects and also player's new deaths

BDoom_monsters.wad - monsters, gibbing. blood

BDoom_objects.wad - decorations, flat sounds, footsteps BDoom_HDsprites.wad - HD and hi-res pickup sprites for items and guns (HD sprites is the only standalone wad that can be used even with original Doom)

All weapons have been carefully rebalanced to act fully original. Except if you decide to use Enhanced Guns weaponset which will give you rebalanced weapons. (Can be changed in options.)

Monsters also have fully vanilla behavior. For example Arch-Vile now can resurrect gibbed monsters, and Spider-Mastermind shots at proper speed (although visually it shoots at higher speed, but that's just an effect).

Most sprites have been redrawn. There are more variations and they look much better than before

Gibs have much improved and optimized physics and better sprites and effects.

LOTS of new deaths. Including Decapitation death (when you deal more damage than needed for regular death but not enough to gib the monster), lots of regular deaths, a chainsaw death for zombies, plasma death and BFG-plasma death.

The Doom community, which is alive and active now, naturally knows everything about it, so there's nothing here for them. For others who are unfamiliar with this here's the tutorial.

What is a source port?

A source port is a special software that was designed based on the Doom's original coding but developed much further. Source ports started long time ago. The most popular ones nowadays are ZDoom, GZDoom (which is basically its OpenGL variant with true 3D) and Zandronum (which is very similar to those to but it has extensive multiplayer capabilities).

Usually a source port is designed for two reasons: it lets you play Doom on modern systems in high resolution and no sound problems; and it adds lots of features which you can then use yourself in custom maps and mods. ZDoom allows for lots of such things, like mouse look and jumping, extensive scripting that allows to create events and complex enemies and objects, GZDoom also allows using 3D models and dynamic lighting, etc.

Practically all modern mods and many modern maps for Doom are not created for vanilla Doom but rather for one of the source ports.

How to use a source port

Grab the one you like off its official site:

GZDoom: Forum.drdteam.org (just find the thread with the biggest version number and download it; as I'm writing the newest one is 2.1.1 and it's the first one that also comes in 64-bit version)

Zandronum: Zandronum.com. As I'm writing this mod will only work with the development build because the stable build doesn't support some necessary functions, so it's WINDOWS-ONLY. Here's the direct link to the current development build: Zandronum.com

For my mod I highly recommend GZDoom. It'll be more stable and it'll give you better performance.

Then get yourself the original Doom. You're going to need the .wad file in it. Wads are resource files which contains everything. Even if you want to play a custom map, you'll most likely still need the original wad (and in most cases it's doom2.wad). You can play my mod with any of the original wad files: doom.wad (Ultimate Doom), doom2.wad (Doom II: Hell on Earth), tnt.wad (Final Doom: Evilution) and plutonia.wad (Final Doom: Plutonia Experiment). These wad files are called IWADs. You can get original Doom on Steam or GoG and then copy the wad from there.

Unpack the source port in any folder you like, then drop the Doom's wad file(s) in that folder.

How to play the mod

UNPACK it. You need the pk3 file inside it, you cannot play pk3 from inside zip without unpacking it. DON'T UNPACK THE PK3. The pk3 is a modern replacement for wad, it's a resource file that shouldn't be unpacked.

Now to start it you can use the command line (my preferred method) or ZDoom launcher.

Command line: type gzdoom.exe -file BDoom_61. You can do it if you're using Total Commander or FAR manager (my personal favorite file manager). You can create a bat file with this command just use it to play later.

In pre-6.1.3 versions of the mod you also need to look at the end of Customize Controls menu and locate Beautiful Doom Effects. There you can specify toggle buttons and then turn on and off any effects you don't like. This is how it looked:

What if I want to play your mod with custom levels?

If you want to play something like the great Alien Vendetta with my mod, it's quite easy. There are hundreds of great levels. The only limit is that the custom levels shouldn't have custom weapons or monsters, otherwise it wouldn't work. So you won't be able to play Neodoom or Torment & Torture. But any wads created in vanilla format (e.g. working with original Doom) will be fine for sure. That's how you do it:

Start with command line: gzdoom.exe -iwad doom2 -file bdoom_61.pk3 av.wad (you don't have to use -iwad doom2, you can select it manually; also you can play the levels from inside zip files so it can be av.zip instead)

OR start ZDL and add av.wad in External Files where you added the mod and click Launch as usual.

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Both Smooth Doom and Beautiful Doom have very configurable DECORATE files but no matter what I try I can't seem to get Beautiful Doom to work with the Smooth Doom monster variations without losing the projectile/particle effects of Beautiful Doom. I'm thinking maybe it's because the projectiles of things like Imps and Barons are tied to their sprites. I'm going to try singling out just the zombie variations from Smooth Doom and see if that will play nicely with Beautiful Doom.